Words Extinguished
By McGowin Grinstead ‘26
I could barely make out a shape from the steamed lips of the window. Thick bulbs of color encompassed me, blurring everything in the scope of the pink beating walls of the nightclub. Music was being sliced from song to song, passing over a nonverbal hum so as to prevent a single moment of silence from slipping through the speakers. We were sweaty, buzzed, and beat up against each other. Bodies slid like water into the bestial thumping pack in the front of the room. And I hadn’t a single thought at all—how could I, in this factory abscess, built to absorb all outside anxieties with the bouncer at the door, in this jungle of mindless escape?
In that moment, and in many others, I often find myself caught on the ledge of two worlds—one of superficiality, of noise and illusive strobe lights, and that of Christ’s silence. Like many young Christians, I’m as addicted to Spotify, Instagram, Friday nights, and doom-scrolling as the next person. I listen to the same songs on repeat during my walks to class so as to numb my to-do lists, and Instagram reels are my reward for making it to the end of the day. I wall myself up in this bubble-wrap of media because I’ve lost the confidence to engage with reality, realizing that as I age, looking life in the face becomes increasingly more difficult. Yet when I kneel on the pew on Sunday and sigh with relief at the wealth of silence like a dehydrated hiker gulping Pedialyte, I remember that this lifestyle I practice is unsustainable.
Noise—the walls we build around our hearts with everything from rap and country music to streaming platforms, gaming, nightclub ragers, and online shopping—is exhausting to maintain. The amount of media and distraction we consume isn’t natural, and never held so great a residence in human life until the modern era. Yet noise has become the norm in contemporary society—the background presence not only in restaurants, airports, and shopping malls, but also the companion to the solitary cloisters of our lives, manifested in our car radios, living room televisions, and wireless headphones. Robert Sarah, in his book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, claims that the absence of silence in modern society “is a symptom of a serious, worrisome illness.” What disease are we trying to mask with our media addiction? Why are we scared of silence?
When I decided these questions were worth asking in my own life, I signed up for a silent retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery just an hour south of Louisville. In the height of summer, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, I found myself sheltered in the stripped walls of the abbey, bound only by the rule of the bells. The monks abide by the rule of St. Benedict, the “father of Western monasticism,” who provided a practical guide for austere religious life over 1,500 years ago. The Trappists are notoriously strict, rising at 3:15 A.M. in ebony Kentucky blackness to pray and then continuing the day with hearty farm labor intersliced with more prayer. And the silence they create at Gethsemani is palpable—from my first dinner spent gazing at Eastern Whip-poor-wills and Blue Jays flaunting in the fountains to falling asleep in my skeleton cot, I felt the power of quiet staring me down like a cold pool. The distractions of my college life couldn’t have been farther away, and I waded uncomfortably in empty darkness, unsure of how to confront myself.
As the days rolled uneasily by at Gethsemani, I began to pay a little more attention to my busy microscopic milieu. Ladybugs crept up the shores of my journal in the sticky morning grass, bees sliced at my eardrums, and mockingjays whistled interchangeably with the monks’ deep-throated chanting. There was a precision in the pattern of those summer days, and nature’s routine retained a certain kindness. Yet the smallest and most dazzling pulse of my new rhythm was the silence of my own heart being gazed upon lovingly by Christ in the chapel. Fruitless chatter and materialism expunged from me, I was finally free to admit my need for His silence. The voiceless peace I had known for so long was showing itself to be a presence.
Robert Sarah claims that the beginner’s misunderstanding of silence is to mistake it for an absence. Yet, “on the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences.” It is perhaps the certainty of an encounter with such a presence that scares us away, for in quietude we have no choice but to encounter ourselves as we truly are, mortal and sinful beings, and thus begin to feel the weighty eyes of eternity estimating our senses. We shrivel at our solitude and recall what is man that thou art mindful of him, the verse inscribed above the entrance of Harvard’s philosophy hall. As all background noise collapses dust to dust, the only word that remains before us is the Logos, the word that sang creation into existence just as perfectly as it became flesh, becoming incarnate so as to bring all things back to Himself.
I left Gethsemani empty-handed and lonesome on a moorish Thursday morning. I had not, so to speak, been transformed by the Lord, nor rattled by the Spirit, but I felt free and possessive of a life worth living. I knew that for far too long I had been ensnared by the siren calls of the world, and even still, I feel her calling me back into a numbed and sequestered conscience. But as if awoken by sharp, icy water, I knew that certain areas of my life needed to be switched off so as to hear that “still, small voice.” As a writer and lover of words, I often feel tempted to linger at the surface, marveling in the aesthetics, without realizing that language is but a tool for us to learn how to listen, an invitation to give ourselves over to contemplation. It’s often what goes unsaid that reveals reality—not words, which are mere symbols of everyday politics. White spaces between stanzas, the click at the end of the phone call, the pause after closing a novel, a flatline—these mirror the truth that heaven and earth are passing away, but His word will never. It is not the act of reading the poem or watching the movie that stirs us, but it is the bittersweet longing we feel in the moments after that make us desperate for a living Art.
We are summoned still to pray. The vocation is thus: to put our screaming hearts asunder to the silence of God and lay still enraptured by His love.
Contributed by McGowin Grinstead. McGowin is a senior at Harvard College studying English.
